> Fading connections. If two friends go a full year without tapping phones, the link between them softens. Not a punishment — a gentle nudge that real friendships are kept alive in person, not online.
One of my very best friends lives in another country. We speak nearly every day, but I haven't seen them in person in over a year.
Another of my friends lives on the other side of the USA. We speak a few times a week, but I haven't seen them in person in about four years now. And that was only because their mom lived nearby. His mom moved, so it's unlikely we'll see each other except once a decade when we do our friends trip to Vegas.
I have other very close friends who I almost never see in person.
My point being, having to tap phones is cool and all but not a great measure of the strength of friendship.
You may have convinced me that this phone tapping thing may, and I am being super serious here, lead to something much much bigger than mere social networks.
I am convinced that this weird Phone Tapping thing may be the next evolutionary step from both social networks and the dead Internet theory (evolution not meant jokingly i.e. both naturally selected and the baby only got the recessive regressions).
The real solution hinges on maybe a future Turing award or Fields medal on physical cryptography for auth/integrity/privacy... but even without that. This is how Facebook got its "grassroots" userbase, from elite students verified via .edu email.
If a Friendster 2.0 actually doubles down on this physicality, and actually concentrate its efforts on making the very act of having to RE-TAP the physicality of a social connection, for example your friends may have an option to fund your trips to meet together if about to get disconnected.
Or of course it might end up being Facebook 2.0 and sell your Physical data to Cambridge Analytica 2.0 to make Grok beta emperor of Great North America CoProsperity Sphere
12 years ago I tried to make a simple app for myself. It would display bars that got smaller as the day/week/month got shorter, and would show the weather as a set of bars between max temp and min, cloud cover, etc.
I got it working well enough to display what I wanted in text and ascii, but I could never get the interface good enough to want to use it daily, and certainly couldn't get the graphical interface working. I threw it a Claude Code, told it what I wanted the graphical interface to look like, and let it run.
It got an app exactly what I wanted, and even found a bug in the date parser that I hadn't noticed. I now have it running in the corner of my screen at all times.
The next app I'm going to build is an iPhone app that turns off all my morning alarms when the kids' don't have school. Something I've wanted forever, but never could build because I know nothing about making iPhone apps and don't have time to learn (because of the aforementioned children).
Claude Code is brilliant for personal apps. The code quality doesn't really matter, so you can just take what it gives you and use it.
The clipboard manager I had been using on my Macs for many years started flaking out after an OS update. The similar apps in the App Store didn’t seem to have the functionality I was looking for. So inspired by a Simon Willison blog post [1] about vibe coding SwiftUI apps, I had Claude Code create one for me. It took a few iterations to get it working, but it is now living in the menu bar of my Mac, doing everything I wanted and more.
Particularly enlightening to me was the result of my asking CC for suggestions for additional features. It gave me a long list of ideas I hadn’t considered, I chose the ones I wanted, and it implemented them.
Two days ago, I decided I wanted a dedicated markdown editor for my own use—something like the new markdown editing component in LibreOffice [2] but smaller and lighter. I asked the new GPT 5.5 to prepare an outline of such a program, and I had CC implement it. After two vibe coding sessions, I now have a lightweight native Mac app that does nearly everything I want: open and create markdown files, edit them in a word-processing-like environment, and save them with canonical markdown formatting. It doesn’t handle markdown tables yet; I’ll try to get CC to implement that feature later today.
Absolutely. I love building things, but sometimes I want something built. LLM assistance is great for when I want a personal tool, code quality be damned, for a specific purpose, without it taking over a weekend.
You don’t need to build an app. You can use the built in Shortcuts app.
create a shortcut that turns off all alarms. Can have it read your calendar or whatever as signal to determine if alarms should be on/off for a certain day/time and have it run at a regular schedule.
They’re way more powerful than you except. I’ve recently rediscovered them and I really couldn’t find a use case for a custom iOS app that wasn’t covered by them.
Co-working with AI is an important skill to learn these days. Similar to paying a bit for AWS for your personal projects as a good way to learn all the AWS tools for your career.
What is the skill that needs to be learned? I've been forced to vibe code everything at work, there's no skill required to ask Claude code to do something.
I think there's a difference in using claude code at work to resolve issues or user stories which are patching existing software and already define what is trying to be solved and what the acceptance criteria is versus using claude code to build something from scratch, where you are acting as an architect.
It leaves more room for skill expression when you're making architectural decisions, defining scope, and designing the application.
I've found that adapting my thinking to how LLMs work best is a real friction point. If you're not doing that, it spits out junk. Your job just has low standards, get used to it.
Yes, realizing the fact that most jobs have low standards, and adapting to LLMs being good enough for these low standards is certainly a friction point. Giving up caring is hard.
"The first to AGI, or a close approximation, is the winner. "
But why? Assuming there is a secret undiscovered algorithm to make AGI from a neuronal network ... then what happens if someone leaks it, or china steals it and releases it openly tomorrow?
So, what will AGI be able to do that will make that bet pay off? Human-like intelligence is already very common. Vastly better than human intelligence seems like it would be worth the expense, but I don't know where we'd get suitable training data.
The bet is that they perfect a new kind of neural network which is roughly as good at "training" as the human mind is as far as "amount learned/experience gained per bit of information input".
Current LLMs are absolutely stupidly inefficient on this front, requiring virtually all human knowledge to train on as a prerequisite to early-college-level understanding of any one subject (granted, almost all subjects at that point, but what it has in breadth it lacks in depth).
That way instead of training millions of TPUs on petabytes of data just to get a model that maintains an encyclopedia of knowledge with a twelve-year-old's capacity for judgment, that same training set and compute could (they hope) instead far exceed the depth of judgement, planning, and vision of any human who has ever lived (ideally while keeping the same depth, speed of inference, etc).
It's one of those situations where we have reason to believe that "exactly matching" human intelligence is basically impossible: the target range is too exponentially large. You either fall short (and it's honestly odd that LLMs were able to exceed animal intelligence/judgment while still falling short of average adult humans.. even that should have been too small of a target) or you blow past it completely into something that both humans and teams of humans could never compete directly against.
Chess and Go are fine examples here: algorithms spent very short periods of time "at a level where they could compete reasonably well against" human grand masters. It was decades falling short, followed by quite suddenly leaving humans completely in the dust with no delusions of ever catching up.
That is what the large players hope to get with AGI as well (and/or failing that, using AI as a smoke screen to bilk investors and the public, cover up their misdeeds, play cup and ball games with accountability, etc)
Finance professor Aswath Damodaran, and others, have made many useful insights as to how AI as an investment is likely to pay out.
One technique is, instead of trying to pick individual winners, look at the total addressable market. Then compare the market size with the capital being pumped in. If you look on this basis, Aswath concluded that collectively AI investment is likely to provide unsatisfactory returns.
Here's a recent headline: "Nvidia’s Jensen Huang thinks $1 trillion won’t be enough to meet AI demand—and he’s paying engineers in AI tokens worth half their salary to prove it"
There are two parts to this. 1. A staggering $1t is expected to be invested in AI. Someone worked out that this was more than the entire capital expenditure for companies like Apple. We're talking about its entire existence here. IOW, $1t is a lot of dough. A LOT.
Secondly, this whole notion that AI is such a sure thing that half the salary will be in tokens should ring alarm bells. '“I could totally imagine in the future every single engineer in our company will need an annual token budget,” he said. “They’re going to make a few 100,000 a year as their base pay. I’m going to give them probably half of that on top of it as tokens so that they could be amplified 10 times.”'
I recall from the dotcom fiasco that service companies like accountants and lawyers were providing services to the dotcom companies and being compensated in stock options rather than cold hard cash like you'd normally expect.
Very dangerous.
As another poster pointed out, this really boils down to FOMO by big tech. I'm expecting big trouble down the line. We await to see if I'm early or just plain wrong.
Neither. It's the most severe FOMO in history. The best case scenario is equivalent to attempting to pick future winners just prior to the industrial revolution really kicking off. Except this time around the technological timelines appear to be severely compressed and everyone is fully aware of what's at stake. And again, that's the best case scenario.
People said this about AWS too. "Why would they save you money??". It turns out that every time they reduce prices, they make more money, because more people use their services.
AI companies have the same incentive. Make it cheaper and people will use it more, making you more money (assuming your price is still above cost). And of course they have every reason to reduce their on costs.
AWS is notorious for being extremely expensive, so it's not like they became cheap. They just reduce prices from extremely expensive to slightly less extremely expensive, and that makes more people decide to start using it.
Since the price they are charging is still way, way above their operating costs there's no surprise really that they end up making more from small price reductions.
If competition drove them to reduce costs to the point where their operating costs started to be a large factor, the paradox would disappear.
Yeah, thinking through it a bit further, the real story here, aside from the mechanical engineering, is the application of AI/machine learning/computer vision processing. The advancements that have made it possible to reason about, simulate, and react to the complexities of a spinning ball in a fraction of a second are pretty cool. My gripe is mostly that this article isn't focusing on and detailing this.
> Funding per student is on the rise, or level on inflation-adjusted $
That's at the state level. But that doesn't account for the explosion in admin salaries and positions. The actual money a district spends on each student has been going down every year. Those funds are going more towards admin activities.
> I got ahold of all the teachers I knew and asked them what impact it would have, and their response was mostly that they would lose their school lunch benefits.
Teachers have a very poor understanding of where their funding comes from. Most just assume "property taxes", but it's far more complicated than that. The department of Ed provides a lot of funding to states that is passed through to the schools. They also enforce the education titles.
Cutting the department of Ed may not have a direct, immediate impact on classroom teachers, but it will have a large downstream effect in a few years.
Student/teacher ratios have gone down, not up over the last few decades. This isn't a lack of funding.
Teachers are put in an impossible position with students who come from homes where the parents don't do their proper jobs. It's never been easier to be a neglectful parent. Your child will be entertained non-stop by an iPad and a video game system. They won't get bored and bother you. You can send them to their room and do whatever you want if you don't care if they are sleeping or not, as long as they are quiet.
The "iPad babies" are an epidemic in schools.
Source:
My sister is a K-12 educator in a poor, rural public school system in southeastern Virginia.
In recent years, she's seen a surge in students who are sorted, improperly, into special education classes. These are students that exhibit symptoms of various learning disabilities, but these symptoms heavily overlap with the symptoms of children who are sleep deprived and over stimulated by dopamine activating content on the devices they are addicted to.
The single variable that actually matters when it comes to school - and nothing else matters until this one is fulfilled: The quality of the peers who make up the student body.
Or put another way: The quality and involvement of the average parent.
A school can absorb an extremely small minority of "problematic" students if the rest of the student body is stellar, but that's about it.
There is not a single thing any public education system can do to counteract that simple fact. If the average student in the classroom is uninterested at best and troublemaking at worst, it doesn't matter how good the teachers are or what the ratios are, or if the classrooms are old and busted or brand new.
Until society becomes serious again, this problem will only get worse as education continues to be a political and culture war football. The best realistic thing I can think of is take a look at nearly all other western social democracies who have much better outcomes and immediately implement student academic tracking. But that would be politically impossible to do in the current state of the US.
I fear that things are going to get far worse before they get better. You could 10x the primary school education budget and likely continue to see worsening results.
When I went from private (poor) primary and middle school, to a rich suburban high school, to a poor inner city high school back in the 90's this was self evident. I didn't think it could get much worse than that, but the administrative and political classes figured out how to wildly beat even my exceedingly low expectations.
If you ask boomers they'll be far more likely to tell you dad was out working 16 hours in the oil field / carpenter for the housing boom or something like that. Mom has no time for you either, she is busy with the 4th baby. Kid gets a nice belting for bad behavior and other than that, be back before the street lights come on for a dinner conversation and then left to your own devices before bed.
I think if anything parents are more involved now than they used to be.
The most obvious difference to me other than ipads/social media is we don't beat kids anymore and we give them way less autonomy.
Yes. When I was ten I had friends ranging from age eight to fourteen that I regularly hung out with, and older people in their forties or fifties that I would drop by when I saw them outside to learn things from. There was a hierarchy of responsibility in our group where the oldest kept track of the ones younger than them, and those kids kept track of the ones younger than them. Beyond that we had no supervision because everyone knew someone who disapproved of something and would tell their parents, whether that be my same age peers disapproving of cursing or the eldest kids disapproving of everyone going to someone's house uninvited. That risk of strain on the friend group kept everyone in line.
Nowadays parents are very strict about the age gaps between their kid's friends, especially with how older kids usually know how to get into risque stuff online. They aren't exposed to differences of opinion and ability as much in real life, and that somewhat hinders their development. There's nothing that can teach you patience like trying to calm down one of the younger kids so you don't get kicked out of a friend's house during the basketball game. Just like there's nothing that motivates you to get better than your six foot two friend intercepting every single pass to your receiver.
And this isn't even getting into the hobbies, interests, and skills kids can learn just by watching adult neighbours. While this year I'm seeing more people outside doing things, for a long while everyone was inside. That meant there weren't older people outside working on cars, tending to their gardens, preparing their boats for fishing season, or just sitting around talking about activities from the past that might be interesting. Kids are more likely to take an interest in a new activity if somebody they know does that activity, because that person is much easier to ask questions and directly show problems to. If they see something online it will probably be a momentary passing interest that they'll forget by the end of the day because once that video's gone so is their interaction with it.
The school system is going to crash out in the US. The public school teachers will readily share symptoms ("enrollment going down", "2X the IEPs of 3 years ago", "non-verbal ipad kids", "kids only sleeping 4 hours a night because of ipads", etc.). As everyone with means or time escapes, the system increasingly distills problems and legitimate special-needs cases while no longer spreading them out among cooperative kids, and teachers will continue to burn out in such a thankless environment.
At varying times in various places, public school is or will become just like riding the bus: technically a viable option for a needed service, if you have no other choice and are ready to suffer in a place that tolerates all manner of dysfunction.
Yes to this! So many people turn a blind eye to the critical role parents play in supporting teachers holding kids accountable. And I get it, holding kids accountable is very, very challenging, but that's the gig people sign up for when they decide to have a family.
And I'm a former high school teacher and my wife is a current high school teacher so I've experienced all of this first-hand.
It's also becoming increasingly more likely to enter into college with lower relative and absolute high school performance.
Perhaps some wonder why they should try so hard in HS, when most anyone that graduates can get into college, and no employer is asking a college grad what their high school grades and scores were.
There was a time back in the 60s or 70s or earlier when anyone that graduated HS could get a decent job. And a time now where most anyone who wants a decent job, must complete college or trade school. The latter are increasingly becoming less correlated with HS performance. The importance of HS performance needed to succeed is regressing back towards what was needed back in the 70s or before, so long as you actually graduate so you can go on to further schooling. In the 80s -00's was a time where you where the ladder was shut off if you didn't go to college, but going to college was far more correlated with having the highest marks.
Students should "try harder" in high school because the point of school isn't to "get into college". The point is to learn how to learn and become better at problem solving. It is my opinion that being a good problem solver is the entire point of education.
In an era of declining birth rates and thus fewer students graduating from high school, of course the third-tier private colleges are going to lower their admission standards in order to survive. In the long run this won't work because employers will eventually figure out that degrees from those colleges are worthless. But they'll keep up their grifting for a while, and leave a lot of mediocre students stuck with huge debts they can't pay off.
For a long time, college education was the easiest way to legally discriminate against applicants. The signal is weakening and the expense of exhibiting the signal has skyrocketed.
> That's at the state level. But that doesn't account for the explosion in admin salaries and positions. The actual money a district spends on each student has been going down every year. Those funds are going more towards admin activities.
Ok? Seems like that's more of a problem than the funding. Or whatever is causing that is more of a problem, but it does a disservice to the general argument of "kids aren't receiving the same level of care" argument to blame a drop in funding--especially when it was so easily falsified.
It's crazy to pay income taxes to the federal government and then have the Department of Education turn around and grant that money back to the several states so they can use it to fund public school districts. A lot of those tax dollars get wasted along the way. Better to cut out the middlemen and send property and/or income taxes directly to local governments, with some state level aid for poor areas with low tax revenue.
That leads to a problem (which you partly addressed with the state level aid) of linking education funding with the wealth of the area which I suspect should be inversely linked i.e. poor areas need more funding and wealthy areas require less as the kids are typically in a more stable situation and aren't skipping meals.
It can be moved much easier. Electricity moves at the speed of light (through an ideal conductor).
If you generate electricity in Iowa you can't easily sell it to California.
Within the Eastern and Western grids, power generated anywhere can be easily sold anywhere else within the respective grids. For example, the Intermountain Power Project in Utah has historically supplied a significant portion of electricity to Southern California.
Moving power between these grids is a little more complicated --- only because the grids are not synchronized. But this too is technically possible and could be made easier if there was more demand to do so.
Have you seen the logistics required to move the output of 15,000 acres of food to the consumer?
A 15,000 acre solar farm generates 6000GWh a year, which can be moved via a single high voltage pylon.
Of course you don't need to move it to California, as you can power an Iowa data centre, or Chicago, instead.
People may pay more to ship "Florida Oranges" or "California wine" across the country. They won't with electric, they'll just buy locally, and if prices reduce then people will use more (building new data centres is the current vogue, but factories and other industry)
Iowa being a net energy exporter means more economic opportunities for Iowa
Yes, but you can't just inject 100s of megawatts into the middle and hope it magically gets to the coasts. There are a lot of losses on the transmission lines and each step has a max capacity.
Talking about losses is a sign of ignorance. Generally a comment making that point can be ignored. Losses are a point that people repeat: maybe because it "makes sense".
operating at median loads, transmission losses over a distance of 1,000 miles generally range between 6% and 15%
Other constraints are what matter - especially if any links are close to their capacity.
Yes, that's why I mentioned the capacity issue as well. While losses aren't significant, they do matter. Especially when we are talking about a 1600 mile distance.
No one electron goes the 1600 mile distance. An increase of cheap energy supply in one place lowers likelihood of production elsewhere, but it is more diffuse than selling Iowan energy in California.
Sure, it's not a trivial exercise, but neither is food transport. That's a much harder problem that's been solved because we had to. The main reason we don't have a continental grid is because we don't need one.
Hmmm, interested to know what you mean by easier to integrate
Being easier to integrate would certainly be helpful.
Temporal seems to be being adopted fairly heavily right now, and this just provides a layer on top of Temporal, without actually augmenting any of the Temporal underlayers.
Hypothetically the same concept could be built for DBOS though this is tightly coupled to Temporal atm.
The main benefits being that you receive raw Temporal behavior out of the box - including their Cloud offering, etc
Their employer? They may work at related company, and are required to say this.
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